South Africa

So much has happened these past few months, I got a Laptop (finally), I've been to England then went to Cyprus for three months. One week before leaving Cyprus my laptop broke down (Its the last time I buy an HP). I went back to England then finally arrived back in SA.

Its now been almost 2 weeks since I sent my laptop to be "repaired" by Incredible Connection with their "Only Windows works" mentality. Even though I told the tech that it was freezing in both Ubuntu and Vista and on several occasions it would freeze before booting the hard drive.

On Saturday (Software Freedom Day) I went to the Department of Science and Technology (DST) at the CSIR in Pretoria which is Karl's soon to be new place of work. I helped a little bit with the recording which you can find at Odeo as a podcast or you can read about it on Tectonic.

The turn out was good it shows that people are interested in Open Source. Which brings me to the presentations more specifically the "content" that was shown on the screen. There was everything from plain black and white presentations to reading off the screen (Which is always boring) and even one person using a PDF. With that said the Translate.org.za and Creative Commons guys (and girls) gave good presentations.

All in all it was a good day, I even has someone recognise me from my website but I'm not sure if that makes me famous or not.

I'm going to be attending for the next three days, I just hope there is enough to do so that I'm kept busy, so far I'm still on track to get my LPIC-1, I'm determined to pass although I could do with some more study time.

Karl Fischer, whose blog I occasionally visit, will be running the community side of the event so maybe I'll get a chance to meet him and I think its about time I started interacting with the the South African Open Source community.

If you are reading this I hope you are able to attend, you don't know what you are missing.

I have also been introducing many many people to Drupal, but unfortunately every time people try to approach me for projects, I have to turn them down, as I am just too busy building Bryght.

To combat this, I am going to be holding a training session on how to become a Drupal developer, for local web developers at the end of June. I hope to help bootstrap the local Drupal community so that we can have better representation from my fellow South Africans.

Considering that there are 11 pages of people who have specified that they live in South Africa on drupal.org, I will also be heading up a DrupalZA group on DrupalGroups, just as soon as I can get an administrator to create it for me.

If you are interested in being kept up to date about this, and being put on the mailing list for South African Drupal users, please contact me via my drupal.org contact form

EDIT : I have created the DrupalZA user group. You can join on groups.drupal.org. You can just log in with your drupal.org auth, so you don't even have to create an account.